Take a message – and take the stairs: Getting to the heart of healthy exercise at work
Abstract
Purpose
Worksites have been targeted as an important setting for physical activity interventions. A recent emphasis for health promoters is the use of point-of-choice interventions to encourage stair climbing at work. The purpose of this paper is to explore campaigns to increase stair climbing at work.
Design/methodology/approach
Focus groups were structured around three messages and four prompts and sought to explore the motivational power of the resources, identify factors contributing to their effectiveness and provide recommendations to improve and optimize content. Benefits and barriers to stair climbing at work were also explored.
Findings
Health awareness, motivation, social norms and time management influence stair climbing at work. Critically, factors associated with the worksite itself can also bias choice independently of any intervention. Results suggest that messages targeting heart health have the greatest impact on reported propensity to climb the stairs at work. Messages targeting rate of respiration for fitness, however, may have a negative effect, given that most people want to avoid getting out of breath at work.
Originality/value
Qualitative research is essential for developing and refining the design detail of point-of-choice interventions and tailoring their components to address individuals’ needs in different settings, but there is little evidence of this in practice.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Retraction notice
The Publisher wishes to retract the precis article “Take a message – and take the stairs: Getting to the heart of healthy exercise at work”, published in Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 24 No. 3, 2016. It has come to the attention of Emerald Publishing that this precis article contains large sections of unattributed text taken from the original research article “Testing messages to promote stair climbing at work”, by Erica Lynn Thomas, Anna Puig Ribera, Anna Senye-Mir, Sheila Greenfield, Frank Eves, published in International Journal of Workplace Health Management, Vol. 8 No. 3, 2015.
Precis articles are intended to summarise original academic research articles for a different audience, and should not include verbatim passages from the original articles. This error occurred due to a miscommunication in the commissioning process.
To avoid any repeated incidents of this nature, Emerald has fully revised its guidelines and briefed its Commissioning Editors. Human Resource Management International Digest sincerely apologises to the original authors and its readers for this error. The original article can be viewed here: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWHM-07-2014-0026.
Citation
Beal, B. (2016), "Take a message – and take the stairs: Getting to the heart of healthy exercise at work", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 17-19. https://doi.org/10.1108/HRMID-01-2016-0011
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited